"Would building on AI be like building for the PC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where you wrote an application that barely worked, confident that you could, when available, seamlessly drop in a new model and get better performance instantly? Or would each model be so unique that every single model update would require an extensive rewrite of the product incorporating it?
The answer to this question does seem to be closer to the former: AI products can incorporate new models fairly seamlessly. The exception, at least in this particular case, appears to be ChatGPT! The problem isn't in the actual functionality; you work with ChatGPT 5 just like you worked with ChatGPT 4o. Rather, the problem for this set of users is the personality. They aren't bothered by the fact that 4o wasn't nearly as good of a model as 5, or that it didn't have the capability of using a reasoning model; they're bothered that the personality is different."
"More generally, I feel better than ever about my position that (1) people predicting imminent super intelligence that takes over the world and renders all economic activity worthless are being ridiculous and (2) people predicting that AI is a nothing-burger that won't amount to anything meaningful are also being ridiculous. AI continues to be a big deal, and even if all progress on the leading edge stopped today, the product overhang remains massive."